Annotated Bibliography: Censorship in Elizabethan England

            For my annotated bibliography assignment, I decided to learn a little bit about censorship in Elizabethan England. Censorship is a topic that I’m very interested in, but it’s such a huge topic that I wouldn’t have known where to start if I was just researching anything to do with it, so I wanted to narrow it down somehow. The Tudors made for some of my favorite English royal drama, Elizabeth I is one of my favorite people, and Shakespeare was producing his work during the Elizabethan and Jacobean (Stuart) Eras, so I decided to learn everything I could about censorship in the Elizabethan Era. There weren’t very many books on that specific topic, but I was able to find several books in the library in which the issue was at least addressed on some level, and I used interlibrary loan to have a few other books sent over.

Elizabethan England: More than just great clothes.

Bindoff, S. T. Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays presented to Sir John Neale. London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1961.

            This book was great for outlining the way the patronage system worked, logistically. It detailed the system in which the queen would grant permission to artists, etc., to produce work with a sort of royal seal attached. It’s a collection of essays, and each focused on a different specific aspect of Elizabeth government or society, which covers a wide range of topics and facets of civilization, but several essays discussed (quite extensively) the intense and systematic control that the crown maintained over art and literature during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Clare, Janet. Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship. Manchester, ND: Manchester UP, 1999.

            This book was research gold for this specific topic, since it dealt directly with the idea of censorship in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I/VI. It focused on censorship in the realm of theater, which might seem limited in the context of things that could be censored, but it did a good job of explaining that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was the main vestige of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and a major part of the social atmosphere of both eras.

Clegg, Cyndia Susan. Press Censorship in Elizabethan England. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2004.

            This is a revisionist history of censorship of the press in Elizabethan England. It details how during the sixteenth century, print culture was rapidly expanding, with a wider and wider variety of materials becoming available to a wider and wider audience. Clegg looks at what types of controls were exercised by royal authorities and evaluates their effects. Overall, it seems that Clegg’s conclusion is that censorship in Elizabethan England was not consistent in either the frequency or the manner of its use.

Taylor, Gary. Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606-1623. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

            This book discusses how Shakespeare’s works were developed and changed as literary criticisms of them evolved during the Jacobean Era. The issue of censorship is only addressed incidentally, but is nonetheless identified as an important aspect of what Shakespeare wrote and is, now. Taylor addresses how the patronage system for the arts is deeply rooted in Shakespeare’s work, and that is one lens through which literary critics may consider his work.

Walker, Greg. Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

            Since it is discussing the politics of theater at the Court of Henry VIII (Elizabeth’s father), this book deals primarily with the early Tudor world rather than the Elizabethan Era, but is nonetheless an interesting account and a good demonstration of how deeply rooted in politics any type of literary work or performance thereof can be, and was, in that time. It demonstrates some of the reasons Elizabeth I may have had for the types of patronage and censorship systems she employed during her reign.

White, Paul Whitfield. Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor and Stuart England. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.

            This book was great for researching the patronage system itself—the ins and outs of how it worked and affected the literary culture of the time. In a sense, patronage was a way for monarchs to encourage and support the arts, but at the same time, it was an indirect means of censorship as well. Although there were certainly some more direct methods of censorship employed during this period, the most common way for a monarch to maintain control over what an artist, author, or musician produced was to be the one paying their way.